COVID19
This was the year that LKS ASE became “normal” having been delivered virtually by staff working from home since 2012. Not surprisingly we haven’t needed to make too many changes to adapt to COVID19. It was business as usual. However, we did contribute some work to the LKS North Blog to share some of the LKS ASE experience. We also produced a guide to COVID19 resources and each month we send out a COVID19 Special Issue of our Current Awareness Service.
Pilot site for native interface testing
LKS ASE is a pilot site for the change to native interface searching after the death of HDAS. It has involved a radical rethink of the way we offer our search services. We have remodelled our offer to users with an improved presentation of search results. The project means LKS ASE is becoming reacquainted with EndNote after a break of nearly 10 years. Not that this is a significant detail it’s just funny how things the go around come around again!
New eBook supplier
Big news for our small electronic only library was the collapse of Dawson’s in the summer our eBook supplier. We worked with colleagues in the North West to identify a new supplier and are now happy customers of Brown’s Books for Students VLe system. This coincided with some changes in demand for our services and the new service has been much appreciated by our users.
amber – the home of ambulance service research
LKS ASE continues to work with colleagues in Manchester NHS Trust Library to develop our repository amber. At the end of this year we are fairly sure that it now contains the vast majority of material from 2006 – 2020. After some checks on the quality of data we hope to have it in business as usual mode in 2021.
We took a new approach to marketing amber this year. Instead of attending conferences to show the benefits of amber form an exhibition stand we decided to be part of the conference and submit a poster. This was a great success for us and our poster abstract was published in the Emergency Medical Journal. See Reference below. In addition we were runners up in the LIHNN Christmas Study Day 3 minutes of mayhem.
JRCALC
LKS ASE usually attends about 15 days of exhibitions and conferences a year at various venues around the UK. This year we managed a visit to Brighton and Portsmouth before the lockdown, but all the other events were cancelled. Instead we attended my first virtual national conference, in this instance for a JRCALC Update organised by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE). LKS ASE has been doing literature searches for work supporting national guideline development. We were given a virtual stand [ https://ambulance.libguides.com/blog/Meet-LKS-ASE-at-the-Virtual-AACE-JRCALC-Study-Day-27th-October-2020 ] the live version was fully interactive with live chat. Anticipating more in 2021 we are going to be making some changes to our publicity materials to be more virtual friendly.
Stay safe and good wishes for 2021.
Matt Holland
LKS ASE Librarian
Holland M, & Dutton M., PP19 Paramedic research literature 2011–2019. A bibliographic analysis of the contents of amber, the ambulance research repository. Emergency Medicine Journal 2020;37:e9-e10. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2020-999abs.19 [Accessed 22 December 2020}.
